Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
31 published records
01 / belief
“The thing I learned most from in high school and college was my romantic relationships, they were more meaningful to me than my classes, even the breakups.”
02 / belief
“We agree there’s something, right now, quite screwed up in the American psyche. Maybe sometimes it’s hard to diagnose, but it seems to me often fairly fundamental.”
03 / belief
“Secure implantation in, as I said, a moral order. I think that secure base for a lot of people has been destroyed.”
04 / belief
“I think London has gotten considerably worse in the last five to ten years, actually.”
05 / belief
“I think AI is also kryptonite in the exact same way, that if you’re a college kid, and you’re not doing any of your papers, you’re just using your GPT to write your papers — that’s kryptonite.”
06 / belief
“I’m on 8th Avenue and 33rd Street, which is god-awful ugly. I think, “Oh, my heart rate can go down now.”
07 / belief
“” I would say all my life, I’ve had a certain idea about America, that we’re sometimes a foolish nation.”
08 / belief
““To David, would you agree with Tyler that New York City is no longer a cultural center of America?” The cultural center, I would say.”
09 / commitment
“I will see you at the Four Seasons of northern Ghana. I publicly thank you. Tyler has something called Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide, especially in the DC area I guess you’re in New York, too.”
10 / belief
“” Now, in my opinion, it’s still not worth it, but my question for you is this: Let’s say the Israel-Iran thing also goes well.”
11 / belief
“One of the things I learned from them is that if you had looked at the media in the ’60s, you would have thought sexual behavior changed radically because suddenly there was porn everywhere, there was nudity everywhere.”
12 / belief
“I think the untold story is the Southern Methodist students, where people are like, “This is great.”
13 / belief
“In my view, they were right about the idea that the internal nature of regimes determines the foreign policy of those regimes, that a dictatorship is bound to be more dangerous than a democracy.”
14 / belief
“” I would say, when any question or topic comes up, that you put what is humane about the issue first, and that this is truly internalized.”
15 / belief
“I would say I think New York City — to the extent that America has a cultural center, which I’m not sure it does anymore — I would still say New York City is (a) the cultural center, (b) the most dynamic city in America.”
16 / belief
“I can say it may have weakened the power of the mainstream media and created more fringe, but I think what influences people is their direct lived experience, not so much media.”
17 / belief
“Now, the 1990s — you’re working for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, I believe.”
18 / belief
“I’d say even though there are some mayors — I think LA, San Francisco, I think Atlanta — I’d say we’re in a period where the quality of our mayors is surprisingly low in a way that it didn’t used to be. It used to be, I would think, the happiest people I know were people who left Congress and became mayors, and the most unhappy were people who left mayors and became congressmen, because you can actually get something done.”
19 / belief
“There’s an attention to quality and detail that is just difficult to believe until you’re there, and to live with that for, say, two weeks, I think you’ll very much enjoy.”
20 / belief
“I think if you go back and read some of the writings from that generation, it’s worth remembering they were not Republicans.”
21 / belief
“Some religious revival — that would do it. In my view, that’s not about money, though money is part it.”
22 / prediction
“I think the act of perception is 90 percent of what you think, that whether we’re seeing a moral act, or seeing a good on a supermarket shelf, or seeing another human being, we’re making quick aesthetic judgements that will determine all the downstream thought processes, and that’s why so many neuroscientists are phenomenologists now, because perception is most of what the mind does.”
23 / prediction
“I think that would lead to American renewal. That does not seem to be happening because the leaders of our major institutions, whether it’s corporations, universities, and so on, are basically laying low.”
24 / evaluation
“I think we’re just not at a moment where that kind of self-confidence — which is very hard to manufacture for one person; it takes a whole group — I just think we’re not at that moment.”
25 / evaluation
“Because the Trotskyites were smarter, the Stalinists did something intelligent, which is, they said, “You’re not allowed to talk to the Trotskyites.”
26 / preference
“I make the attempts, and because in the things I care about, which are more humanistic, it’s hoovering up all the crap on the internet about what love is, or do you grow from post-traumatic experiments?”
27 / evaluation
“Part of the problem is the opportunity structure is so slim that everybody is applying to the same few schools and the same few internships, so the rejections are massive.”
28 / evaluation
“It’s that segregation is always wrong; slavery is always wrong. That sense of a held moral order was essential to the existential security of all people in our society and our ability to settle disputes, because we had an understanding of right and wrong.”
29 / evaluation
“Because I don’t. It will teach me lots of facts, and I will defer to it, but it’s never persuaded me much with arguments, whereas humans have.”
30 / prediction
“” I think AI is a great tool, but I’m unthreatened by it because I don’t think it has understanding, I don’t think it has judgment, I don’t think it has emotion, I don’t think it has motivation.”
31 / evaluation
“” I think we’ve amputated the importance of what we stupidly call the non-cognitive skills, which is social skills, which is drive, which is motivation.”